Xuan Bello: “Literature is a reflection on the past that invites us to live the present”

The writing of Juan Bello (Paniceiros, Tineo, Asturias, 1965) does not create noise or know genres. It is the literature of the little ones, rooted in the lineage of the close ones, of Castelao — the one who led Asturian things— and Cunqueiro — too School of melecineros and fables of various xentes– and who knows the secret that makes what is right common to all, as it happens in his Universal history of Paniceiros. “We often forget,” he claims, “that literature is always done from one place. The writer is from the time and country, but it is not a political statement, it is perniciousness. You are from the time you had to live. I am 58 years old, from Asturias, and I write about what I see from my window. I think that’s the formula for great literature: write about what you see from your window; not what you would like to see, which can also be another way out». Bello likes literature with an accent. Furthermore, he realizes that literature without emphasis is not literature. “Literature is a word spoken in a solution of harmony, and a word spoken in a solution of harmony was spoken in a moment and in time and from a place, and somehow it must carry in its spirit the accent of the place. That’s why I admire Delibes so much, for example.

You either have an accent or you don’t. At the root of Bell’s emphasis is poetry, the poet’s view. “I’m trying, but I don’t know if I’m a poet,” he says, adding that he would calculate that he’s published about two hundred poems, and he’s written many more. “My basic conversations are with Dante, TS Eliot, Cardarelli, Maiakovski, Cunqueira… and I try to convey in my stories what I learned in poetry, which is to pay attention to the concrete. Tolstoy warned: “If you want to sing the world, sing your village.” And William Blake said that a poet is one who can see the complexity of the universe in a grain of sand. Writing is somehow seeing, a way of seeing. And I don’t like all ways of seeing, not all of them reveal the world that I like».

Literature also has, he believes, a therapeutic function, restoring balance in the world, which is connected to political commitment. And he explains: “I consider everything I wrote to be fighting literature, it is in the service of the Asturian language, the poor who were told that Asturian is an ugly way of speaking. But since this is martial literature, what it proposes is a vision of a world in which people find a certain balance. I’m not interested in creating a chasm, it seems to me that creating a chasm is very simple, something any retiree or teenager can do. It is difficult to build bridges across the abyss, it is a difficult thing».

Delving into his own poetics, Bello alludes to memory and adds that the “labyrinth of memory is terrifying,” and as the years pass, that labyrinth gets bigger. «If we return to the myth of the labyrinth in Knossos, we discover that we are all Ariadne, Theseus and the Minotaur at the same time. The labyrinth of memory is crucial — he warns — because human beings are more in the past than in the future and much more in the past than in the present. Literature is a review of the past that calls for living in the present. seize the day. I believe that the site must invite you to live in the moment, but very aware of what you have already experienced. A friend of mine pointed this out in a newspaper column, quoting Agustín de Hipona: “I don’t mind traveling, but it is very important that I have traveled,” which is that Agustín de Hipona said, “I have no mind to love, but it is very important that I had loved”. I think that literature is essentially that, an invitation to live in the present, to live in the moment. Take the flower of the day, great writers tell us again and again. We all know who we are… but we forget who we are. Literature must be a kind of togetherness, the resolution of the present. I come from a horrible past, we all come from a horrible past, for one or another. But right now, I’m reading this page, I’m drinking this glass of water, and I reach out and pick a peach off the tree and bite into it. In that moment “I am aware that I am alive. It is life and intensity and illumination,” says the poet.

“Cunqueiro makes Castelao’s prose dance”

Xuan Bello arrives this Thursday with his poetry in Padrón as part of the conference Rosalía not Camiño —curated by Chus Pato, include literary walks and recitals—, which will come to Santiago on Friday and Lugo on Saturday. “Returning to Galicia always has something special for me, something sacred,” says someone who admitted to reading Galician literature since the age of 15. “And that I did not inherit the Galician language from my father, who was from Bierz, because he insisted that I not pass it on to me. But surely there will be something in the blood that dances in me. Not to mention the current of sympathy that exists in Asturias for everything Galician, for the country and its language. Rosalía entered it first, remember: «At the age of 13 I was reading On the banks of Sar, which I thought was an amazing book. And very quickly new larks and Galician songs». Bello, he says, was lucky to study in a system where “ordinary mortals” could enjoy the world of knowledge that opened up in BUP second-year literature book Lázaro Carretera, for which, according to the review, cantigas were very important , Galician medieval poetry… «Thus at the age of 15 I already had Castelao and Long stone night by Celso Emilio Ferreira. And for me it was intellectually decisive, fundamental. Then a lot more came, but that remained,” he says.

His literature is rooted in closeness, in the everyday, which makes one think that Cunqueiro and Castelao are still on his bedside table, but also authors such as Josep Pla and Augusto Monterroso. “Castelao invents Galician prose, he somehow figures out how to write prose in Galician, which may seem very easy now, but at the time he was doing it, it was honestly difficult. And Cunqueiro! I think he is without a doubt the best Spanish storyteller of the 20th century. That inventiveness, that Update of the Middle Ages that he makes, that peasant root, mixed with the understood modernity of the modern age… Cunqueiro dances Castelao’s prose. What happens a little bit with Plao, the author who in a way fixes Catalan prose, who creates what Eliot called medium stylea language that does not bother to read, but everyone perceives it as very well written”, he notes.

Is there Cunqueiro in Catalan or in Spanish?, he asks.

-I do not think so. In Catalan it would be Sagarra, but since he is a great writer, if you compare him to Cunqueira, he turns out to be a lesser author.

Cunqueiro, moreover, is inexhaustible, he emphasizes. “Everywhere you look and, as he has used all his life – and I am a bit like him – newspapers as a blueprint for his works, his articles do not stop coming out, each one more wonderful. Cunqueiro is the author of absolute reference for me”, he assures.

And as Monterroso points out, Cunqueiro was funny, both of them had that mischievous look, that somewhat medieval look, of a wise peasant, deep. “The thing about Polo, the accordion player from Tine, who was at a party at Carmen de Veig’s one day when it suddenly started to rain and everyone started complaining: “Oh, it’s raining on the day we have the party.” And Polo is just said, “My solu from the corn lift,” because he knew that was what the country needed. And literature is the art of paying attention to oneself, he continues, in the environment. “You start reading Georgics Virgil and can only be understood by those who have specific peasant experience, who have soiled their hands with dirt. And, of course, not understanding the work of this dimension means losing a lot”, laments Xuan Bello, who defends that peasant wisdom, knowledge of the cycles of nature, the rhythms of the countryside should not be wasted: “This knowledge contains the knowledge of the place that man occupies in the universe, that is what gives us a place in the world”, he concludes.